Well, this marks the last of my posts as last-minute guest editor of the Daily Shvitz. It's been fun. Thank you to Michael for inviting me to post. Thank you for reading. And wishing you all a happy Pesach.

I leave you with a symbol of the great relationship between our two nations. (Video via Stephen Pollard.)

I didn't know Rosie O'Donnell was an expert on military operations. According to her personal blog, Britain invaded Iranian waters as a pretext for a US-led invasion.

False flag operations are covert operations conducted by governments, corporations, or other organizations, which are designed to appear as if they are being carried out by other entities.

the british did it on purpose
into iranian waters
as
US MILITARY BUILD UP ON THE IRANIAN BORDER

I suppose the US and Britain also orchestrated the increasingly offensive campaign by the Iranians of forcing British service personnel to make televised confessions and apologies. I suppose Tony Blair's repeated and restrained calls for the release of his troops is just a smokescreen. Why did I not see all of this before?

Sculptor Cosimo Cavallero and his 6ft chocolate ChristCatholics are up in arms over a 6ft chocolate sculpture of Christ that will go on display in New York over Easter.

The work, called "My Sweet Lord," will be on view in a window of the Roger Smith Hotel's Lab Gallery on E. 47th Street. The sculpture is made of almost 200 pounds of dark chocolate.

According to the New York Daily News, because the statue is "anatomically correct" (which I think is shorthand for 'stark bollock naked') some Catholics believe it is in bad taste:

"It's an all-out war on Christianity," fumed Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights. "They wouldn't show a depiction of Martin Luther King Jr. with genitals exposed on Martin Luther King Day, and they wouldn't show Muhammed depicted this way during Ramadan. It's always Christians, and the timing is deliberate."

Chocolate Christ sculptor Cosimo Cavallaro, who is himself a Catholic, said giving Jesus a loincloth would be "ridiculous."

"This person is talking from a very narrow window," he said of Donohue. "They're not allowing themselves to open their hearts. ... If it makes them feel better, I'll ask for their forgiveness and do 10 Hail Marys, but they should just lighten up and be more accepting of people."

March 2007 must be one of the worst months in recent history for the New York City Police Department. Despite figures released this week showing a further drop in crime, the city's cops keep coming under attack.

As if the death of two auxiliary officers in a Greenwich Village shooting wasn't enough, March has also witnessed the shooting of one officer in the foot and the stabbing of another officer in the head. Yesterday, an officer was attacked by a man wielding a railing from a hospital bed where he was supposed to be under guard.

Miguel Gabriel, 19, had his feet shackled and his arm cuffed to the bed, but he somehow managed to wrench the railing free, attacking officer Mikhail Vinitsky who was supposed to be guarding him.

Vinitsky tried to subdue Gabriel with pepper spray and a baton before finally drawing his gun and shooting him four times. According to the New York Daily News:

Even after Gabriel was shot, cops answering Vinitsky's radio call for help had to use a stun gun and pepper spray to subdue the attacker, Police Commissioner Raymond Kelly said.

"Even though he was shot, he was still standing, and fighting," Kelly said after visiting Vinitsky, who was in stable condition. He suffered a concussion and required six stitches to close a gash on his head, police said.

Gabriel was in stable condition at the same hospital.

Hillel Neuer, executive director of U.N. Watch, gave a short but blistering speech to the United Nations Human Rights Council recently:

Faced with compelling reports from around the world of torture, persecution, and violence against women, what has the Council pronounced, and what has it decided?

Nothing. Its response has been silence. Its response has been indifference. Its response has been criminal.

One might say, in Harry Truman's words, that this has become a Do-Nothing, Good-for-Nothing Council.

But that would be inaccurate. This Council has, after all, done something.

It has enacted one resolution after another condemning one single state: Israel. In eight pronouncements — and there will be three more this session — Hamas and Hezbollah have been granted impunity. The entire rest of the world — millions upon millions of victims, in 191 countries — continue to go ignored.

[...]Let us consider the past few months. More than 130 Palestinians were killed by Palestinian forces. This is three times the combined total that were the pretext for calling special sessions in July and November. Yet the champions of Palestinian rights — Ahmadinejad, Assad, Khaddafi, John Dugard — they say nothing...Why has this Council chosen silence?

Because Israel could not be blamed. Because, in truth, the dictators who run this Council couldn't care less about Palestinians, or about any human rights.

Needless to say the speech, which you can read in full here or watch here, did not go down well. Council President Luis Alfonso de Alba refused to "express thanks" for the statement, ruled the remarks inadmissible to the official record and banned further statements "in similar tones."

His response has been taken to task on the editorial pages of the Wall Street Journal and the New York Sun today.

"When it comes to actual human rights, the United Nations Human Rights Council reflexively discharges obfuscation, like a squid and its ink," says the Journal. While the Sun points out that Mr de Alba has previously thanked a Zimbabwean speaker for denying human rights abuses under President Mugabe and a Sudanese delegation for saying reports of violence against women in Darfur were exaggerated.

Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. But it seems that as far as human rights go, they end when you criticize the United Nations Human Rights Council.

The Subway blogger had a slightly tense commute into work this morning:

An older gentleman gets on the train. Looks normal enough. Wearing a suit and carrying a briefcase. He has a fedora hat on and a big, white beard. Normal, right?

Well, he walks into the center of the train car and we start to pull out of the sation.

Very casually he says, “I have a question. Does anyone here think they can bomb Iran?”

Ummm what?

Everyone sort of looks around at each other and ignores him. He didn’t just say what I though he said…did he?

Then I take another look at his briefcase. Large (like extra wide), matte back, and sorta beat up. I’m thinking, boy I hope he doesn’t think HE can bomb Iran via this train car.

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There's a slightly confusing article on the Guardian website today about a raucous anti-Semitism debate at the annual conference of Britain's National Union of Students.

Feelings ran so high in the debate at Blackpool that the chairman was forced to ban the taking of photographs and filming on the conference floor as some unidentified delegates were heard to shout "we have your photographs on file" at speakers.

Quite who the people shouting were, and who they were shouting at, is not explicitly clear, but the topic of discussion "whether the NUS should implement the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia's (EUMC) working definition of anti-Semitism" clearly brought out the worst in some people.

The contentious issue was the EUMC's inclusion that "such manifestations could also target the state of Israel, conceived as a Jewish collectivity".

In other words: criticism of Israel can sometimes be anti-Semitic. True or False?

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The New York Sun reports on a conference of Arab lesbians that was held in Haifa yesterday:

Many of the attendees said they were sad that the only place safe enough to hold a conference for gay Arab women was in a Jewish area of Haifa, which has a mixed Arab-Jewish population. Israel's Jewish majority is generally tolerant of homosexuality

"This conference is being held, somehow, in exile, even though it's our country," said Yussef Abu Warda, a playwright.

Driven deep underground for the most part, only 10 to 20 Arab lesbians attended the conference, organizers said. Most blended in with Israeli lesbians and heterosexual Arab female supporters without making their presence known.

"We'd like all women to come out of the closet — that's our role. We work for them," said Samira, 31, a conference organizer who came with her Jewish Israeli girlfriend. Samira agreed to be identified only by her first name for fear of reprisals.

[...]Homosexuality, which is strictly forbidden by Islam, is considered taboo among most of Israel's Arab citizens, who make up 20% of the country's population.

The (London) Times US editor Gerard Baker hits the nail on the head with his description of the current Iranian hostage crisis as 'humiliating' (via Clive Davis). It's a word I toyed with yesterday, but was too cowardly to use.

With the 25th anniversary of the war between the UK and Argentina over the Falkland Islands approaching this weekend, Baker says there are voices calling for a more robust (military?) response from Britain. Tony Blair's critics are bemoaning the fact that Margaret Thatcher would have sorted the Iranians out quick sharp (by sending a naval task force to the Persian Gulf?).

But Baker calls the similarities between Thatcher and Blair's dilemmas "simply hooey." The right course of action, says Baker, is not necessarily clear cut or awe-inspiring:

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Only one other aquarium, the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium, Japan, (above) keeps whale sharks.

Whale Sharks live for up to 120 years in the wild, but a recent Japanese study showed that in captivity their average lifespan is about 502 days.

At the Georgia Aquarium, a whale shark died earlier this year when his stomach was punctured by feeding tubes used because the shark had stopped eating, according to the NewYork Times:

“Findings show that Ralph’s stomach appeared abnormal, because it was thin-walled and perforated,” Jeff Swanagan, the executive director of the aquarium, said in a news release. “This likely caused peritonitis which led to Ralph’s death.”

[...]Though he [Dr. Robert Hueter] cautioned that it was impossible to know for sure what caused the punctures, he added, “the only thing that came out of that discussion was looking at the force-feeding method and looking at the tube.” He said the panel recommended using tubes with more rounded ends in the future to prevent injuries.

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It's the end of another tense day in the case of the 15 British sailors and marines who were captured by Iranian forces on Friday.

In typical British fashion Tony Blair has issued a stern if slightly understated threat to "ratchet up diplomatic and international pressure" to force Iran into freeing the prisoners. Freezing biilateral business certainly isn't going to be the clincher.

Meanwhile, the Iranians have paraded their captives on television and even have a televized admission from sailor Faye Turney that the British were in Iranian waters when they were captured. A claim that is vehemently denied by the British. (And they have satellite data to prove it.)

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The World Health Organization and UNAIDS have officially added male circumcision to their list of treatments to prevent the spread of HIV after trials in Africa found it reduced the risk of the disease among heterosexual men by 50 to 60 percent.

Kevin De Cock, director of HIV/AIDS at the World Health Organization said: "The recommendations represent a significant step forward in HIV prevention."
"Countries with high rates of heterosexual HIV infection and low rates of male circumcision now have an additional intervention which can reduce the risk of HIV infection in heterosexual men."

Iranian rock band Hypernova fit right in on the streets of New York

Hypernova are a very Western-looking Iranian rock band currently playing in America. The New York Times has an interesting article and video in which songwriter and frontman Raam explains how the band put their lives at risk every time they play:

“What we do in Iran is not as easy as it seems,” Raam said, with a verbal swagger belying the risk, in Iran, of performances that can lead to arrest, large fines and even a public flogging.

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Two writers face a whopping £3 million ($5.9 million) legal bill after losing a court battle that claimed Dan Brown stole the plot for his bestselling The Da Vinci Code from their book Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

What on earth motivated authors Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh to sue Brown in the first place is anyone's guess. Not only was their 1982 book a bestseller of its time, but Brown's 2003 novel that suggested Mary Magdalene and Jesus had a child, reignited a huge interest in the subject and no doubt sold a lot more copies of Holy Blood, Holy Grail.

Following their defeat the two authors issued a statement saying:

"We believed, and still do, that non-fiction authors would suffer and be discouraged from extensive research if it was found that any author could take another's ideas, 'morph' and repackage them, then sell them on."

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Kathy Sierra's weblog: Creating Passionate UsersThe blogosphere can be a cruel and vicious place. But there has been much hand-wringing lately among bloggers after a series of online death threats against technology blogger Kathy Sierra.

For the past month Sierra has weathered threats of physical and sexual violence in the comments section of her blog and on other blog sites. Anonymous correspondents have threated to slit her throat and hang her. Come this weekend, Sierra was so in fear of her life that she withdrew from a speaking engagement at an ETech conference in San Diego, called the police and announced her retirement from the blogging community:

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